by Doug Cornett
“Yeah!” I said, swept up in Shanks’s excitement. “But…how are we going to do that?”
“We need to get a full confession from the ducky thief.”
“Or thieves,” Peephole said. “But…how are we going to do that?”
Shanks pursed her lips and squinted up at the sky, as if the answer were written up there somewhere. “We need a telltale heart,” she said at last.
“A what?”
“A telltale heart. It’s from an old horror story by a guy named Edgar Allan Poe. My parents used to read it to me before bed. See, in the story there’s this lunatic who strangles an old man and then hides the body in his house. The lunatic thinks he’s gotten away with it, but then the sound of the old man’s beating heart, thump thump thump, drives him out of his mind and he ends up confessing everything.”
“And your parents read this to you as a bedtime story? That explains a lot,” Peephole said.
Shanks bit her lip and arched her eyebrow. “Yeah…it is a little weird, now that I think about it. Anyway, we need a telltale heart for our plan to work.”
Just then I caught sight of Mister E, our ducky that Shanks had swiped from Mr. Babbage’s yard. He was still perched on the roof of our lean-to.
“I’ve got it!” I said, suddenly struck with an idea. “What’s better than a telltale heart?”
Shanks and Peephole looked at each other, then looked at me.
“A telltale ducky!”
A plan was quickly formulating in my head. The only problem was I couldn’t tell if it was brilliant…or the dumbest idea ever.
Tomorrow, at the Triple B, we were going to find out.
My parents were in the kitchen, dancing together in front of the stove to the oldies station they always kept the radio tuned to. I stood in the doorway and watched them for a minute or two.
They shimmied from side to side in unison, singing along with the radio. When they didn’t know the words to a song, their voices got soft and mumbly, but when the chorus came around again and they knew the words, they got extra loud and belted it out. My mom was a good dancer, but my dad was…well…not exactly a ballerina. He had two dance moves: one was an off-balance foot-shuffle thing that went along with a circular hand motion that looked like he was about to fall off a ledge while simultaneously struggling to reel in a twenty-pound marlin, and the other was a panicky wiggle where his hands shot up and his knees wobbled as if they were made of rubber. I suspect that this is the exact movement people make if they wake up and find that their pajamas are on fire.
The pot on the stove bubbled and belched out a pungent odor that was a cross between ketchup and gym shoes. My mom and dad were so absorbed in their bratwurst experimentation and old-person dance-a-thon that they didn’t notice me watching them.
That was the thing about being an only child. Sometimes, you felt like the center of the world, a celebrity with all the attention you could ever want. It could really drive a guy crazy. But when I wasn’t the center of attention, I kind of missed it.
The song on the radio faded, but my parents kept dancing, as if they could hear the music in their heads, and that was all that mattered.
“What’s up, guys?”
My mom swiveled and flashed me a startled look. White flour streaked her hair, which made her look like a grandma. For a moment, it was as if I was peering into the future. “Paul! There you are!”
She crossed the kitchen and wrapped me up in an embarrassingly tight hug. She asked about Peephole. I told her. She hugged me again, and this time, it looked like she might cry.
“I forgot to tell you, Paul,” my dad interjected. “I almost stepped on a mattabuddy in the backyard today.”
“What’s a mattabuddy?”
“Nothing, buddy, what’s-a-matta with you?” He ruptured into a giggle and turned to my mom for a high five, but she smiled at him crookedly.
A new song started up on the radio. A fast and gritty rock-and-roll tune with a wacky saxophone playing all kinds of insane notes. My dad launched into his twenty-pound-marlin dance, making the reeling motion at me so that I was the fish that chomped on the wrong worm. For some reason, there was a spaghetti noodle dangling from his ear.
“Bratwurst, bratwurst. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner…,” he bellowed. “Bratwurst, bratwurst. Please make us the winner!”
If there was a trophy for weirdest family in Bellwood, it would be no contest.
* * *
I chopped onions and celery into tiny cubes and listened while my dad explained the ins and outs of a good “currywurst” recipe.
“Now, this sauce is not the main character of our dish. It’s more of a sidekick that helps the main character on the journey.”
“So who’s the main character?”
“The bratwurst wrapped in a pancake. But like a good sidekick, the sauce makes everything possible for the hero. See, with ‘currywurst,’ everybody gets hung up on the spices,” he said, pointing at me with a wooden stirring spoon. The noodle that had been dangling from his ear seemed to have migrated to the spoon. He was standing in the middle of the kitchen while my mom pirouetted around him on her way from the fridge back to the stove. “And don’t get me wrong, Paul, the spices are important. You need your paprika, your pepper, your chili powder—”
“Beep, beep!” My mom, carrying a big steel pot of sloshing something or other, nudged my dad out of her way with her elbow.
“But the secret ingredient, the real magic element that sets a Marconi ‘currywurst’ apart…” My dad lowered his voice and leaned close to me, as if revealing the answer to an ancient mystery. He waved the wooden spoon like a sorcerer’s wand, and the noodle moved back and forth in a frantic wiggle. “Is the brown sugar.”
“Sugar?” I said. Of course, I already knew about the secret ingredient because my dad gave me this talk every year, but it was important to him. My parents made a different dish for each Bonanza, but the secret ingredient was always brown sugar. Some dads show their kids how to change the oil in a car or throw a good spitball. I got “currywurst” advice.
When I finished with the onions, my mom handed me a bunch of green grapes and instructed me to remove the peels from each one.
“Grapes?” I asked. “In a ‘currywurst’?”
My mom put a hand on her hip and tilted her head. “Did the hunchback assistant Igor ever question the mad scientist’s methods?”
“Uh…I’m guessing no?”
“That’s right. He followed his orders and tried to stay out of the way of the lightning.”
“Got it,” I said. “You want me to peel grapes, I’ll peel grapes.”
For every few grapes I peeled, I’d pop one into my mouth. I was tempted to eat more than one at a time, but I knew better. Once, Peephole and I had a contest to see how many grapes we could fit in our mouths. Peephole fit nine, which made him the winner. Before he could celebrate, though, he inhaled a couple of them and started choking so hard that a grape shot out of his nose. I smiled at the memory, but then I thought of all those beeps coming from Trillium’s machine in the hospital, and how helpless Peephole looked hugging his knees out at our headquarters.
My mom had a talent for reading my mind. She put down her spatula and squeezed my shoulder.
“She’s going to be all right, Paul,” she said.
“Who?”
“Trillium.”
“Oh. I know.” I said it quickly, but I realized that I didn’t know.
Now my dad turned to me. My parents were smiling, but only with their mouths. Their eyes looked worried and sad. It was a look I was seeing a lot of these days from the adults in my life. That’s when I realized that neither of them really knew whether Trill was going to be okay.
“So where was Peephole hiding out?” My mom asked.
It was sort of a trick question. I didn
’t want to say “our secret headquarters,” because then it wouldn’t be secret anymore. But I didn’t want to lie to my mom, either.
I settled on the sort-of truth. “Out at the old drive-in.”
“It won’t be the ‘old drive-in’ for long,” my dad said. “By the end of the summer, that will be the Conquistador.”
He was right, and I knew it. But I still didn’t have to like it. That old field was where Bellwood used to gather on Friday nights to watch movies. Everybody there, together. It was where the One and Onlys met to solve mysteries. To tell stories. To talk nonsense. To comfort each other.
And now…the stakes with pink ribbons, the churned-up dirt, the rows of construction equipment. THE CONQUISTADOR IS COMING!
My dad seemed to read my thoughts. “Things are certainly going to change around here.”
Change. That was something I was getting a little tired of. “But it won’t change things for us, will it?”
My mom squeezed my shoulder again. “It might, Paul. See, a Conquistador opened up a couple of years ago in Lexington, and everybody started shopping there.” Lexington was a few towns over from Bellwood. “The small stores, the local businesses—places like Honest Hardware—they just couldn’t attract customers any longer. Those places lost a lot of money. Most have shut down.”
“It’s like a ghost town,” my dad added, shaking his head. “All of Main Street is shuttered.”
“How come Bellwood is letting the Conquistador in if everybody’s so scared of it? And doesn’t Old Man Shamtraw own that land? Why would he sell it to the Conquistador?”
“Scared?” Again, the defeated tone in my dad’s voice. “Paul, they’re excited. I don’t know exactly why Mr. Shamtraw chose to sell the land, but I can guess. He probably made a lot of money from the deal. It’s happening all over. Bellwood isn’t alone.”
I was afraid to ask the question that was on my mind, but I asked it anyway. “So what happens if we have to close the store?”
“We won’t have to close the store,” my mom said. “Not for a while, at least.”
“If that happens,” my dad said, “then we’ll just have to make some changes.”
There was that word again. “What kind of changes?”
“Well, I don’t know yet, Paul. But your mom and I would need to find new jobs.”
This was a totally strange thing to imagine. My parents had always worked at the hardware store. What else would they do? Drive school buses? Be waiters at a restaurant? Lawyers? Teachers? I couldn’t picture it.
“And we might need to relocate.” My mom uttered the words so softly that I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.
“Relocate? What does that mean?”
“It means we would have to move, Paul.”
Finally, I understood why my parents were afraid of the Conquistador. And for the first time, I realized how perfectly fitting the name “Conquistador” was.
“Unless…,” my dad started to say, then looked to my mom for permission to continue. She nodded. “Unless we win the Triple B. If that happens, then maybe…who knows? Maybe…” He looked too embarrassed to express the thought out loud.
“Maybe what?”
He finished the sentence. “Then maybe we could open up a bratwurst food cart.”
I thought back over the past couple of weeks. The worried glances. The mumbled conversations. All that time spent in the kitchen, preparing. Now it all made sense.
It was anybody’s Bonanza. But the Marconis really needed it to be ours.
“I just hope Mr. Pocus likes pancakes,” my mom said, sprinkling a pinch of cinnamon into a mixing bowl. “Since he’s the chief taster, our fate is in his hands.”
“Ugh,” I said. “I don’t think Pocus likes anything.”
“He has turned into a bit of a grump in recent years,” my dad agreed, stroking his beard.
“Recent years?” I said, taken aback. “You mean there was a time he wasn’t a grump?”
As an answer, my dad held up a wait-a-sec finger, then dashed out of the room.
“Believe it or not,” my mom said, “Mr. Pocus was a popular teacher a long time ago. Kids actually wanted to be in his class.”
I fixed her with a sideways glance. I didn’t believe it.
My dad bounded back into the kitchen with his yearbook once again. “Who would have thought I’d be unearthing this thing so much this week?” He laughed and flipped through the pages, then stopped on a photo collage near the back. “There!” He slapped a finger on a photograph of a smiling young couple holding paper plates. Both the man and the woman wore aprons, and the man had a smooth face with wide, kind-looking eyes. The woman was making a funny face with her tongue out and her eyes crossed.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“Read the caption,” my dad said.
Mr. Pocus, elementary school math teacher, and his wife, Clara, serve up their famous homemade tomato soup at the annual community picnic.
I blinked twice and squinted once again at the face of the young man. “Pocus was young once?”
“Funny how time works,” my dad said.
“I didn’t know he was married,” I said, trying to make sense of Pocus’s smile.
“Happily,” my mom said. “In fact, I’d say he hasn’t been quite the same since Clara passed about ten years ago. I think she was the one who brought him the most joy.”
I kept staring at the picture, trying to process this new information. Of course, I knew that Pocus had to have been young at some point, but seeing a picture of him with his wife, smiling, having fun, made it real for the first time. Made him seem real.
“That’s the smile we want to see tomorrow,” my dad said, then twisted back around to sniff the boiling pot on the stove.
Ronald poked his nose into the kitchen, sniffing the floor, then looking up at us with raised eyebrows, as if surprised to find out that we were all still living in this house, too.
“You know who you’re looking at, boy?” my dad said, pointing a goopy spatula at Ronald, who answered by slowly slurping a tongue across his snout.
“You’re looking at the future wieners of Bellwood!”
Some of history’s most important moments, in no particular order: the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the French Revolution, the first steps on the moon, and the Bellwood Bratwurst Bonanza. I realize that as a Bellwoodian, I might be a little biased.
Ever since Wolfgang Munchaus threw the first Bonanza in an effort to save our little hamlet, Bellwood had never canceled a Triple B. And so it was an occasion for celebration when the town arose Saturday morning to a clear sky and fresh, breathable air. On the local news, reporters relayed the happy news that, thanks to the tireless efforts of regional firefighting organizations, the wildfire was now eighty percent contained. Crews had been digging containment trenches around the perimeter of the fire to make sure it couldn’t spread, and the wind had shifted away from us. The fire hadn’t been completely put out, but it seemed like the worst was over.
I woke up early and took a bike ride down the forest service road at the end of my block, into the Bell Woods. I needed to make a quick stop at the swamp to gather a backpackful of duckies. They were going to come in handy at the Triple B.
Even though my mom and dad had been dancing and laughing the night before, it was game time now. From the moment they woke up, they both wore focused, serious expressions on their faces and were buzzing around the house with purpose. My mom did a special yoga session, during which she bent into various contortions and chanted “Bo-nan-za” over and over again. Ronald and I watched this from the door while my dad stood silently with his hands in his pockets and stared at the empty space on the mantelpiece—the space he’d asked me to clear for the Triple B trophy.
Of course, I had big plans for the Triple B, too
, but they didn’t have anything to do with sausages. This was the day the One and Onlys were going to catch the ducky criminal. Well, at least two-thirds of the One and Onlys. I wished once again that Peephole would be able to help Shanks and me with my plan, but I knew he needed to be with his parents and Trill.
* * *
The Bonanza took place on the blacktop and playing field of the elementary school. On the car ride there, we listened to “Eye of the Tiger” twice. (We sat in the parking lot of the elementary school for a few extra minutes to hear the whole song the second time around—my mom danced with her shoulders and my dad snapped perfectly to the beat of a different song.)
As we unloaded the car, my mom ran through the list of supplies. “Spatula.”
“Check,” my dad responded.
“Grill.”
“Check.”
“Brown sugar.”
“Check,” my dad said, winking at me.
“Positive attitude.”
After a moment of silence, I realized my parents were both looking at me, waiting for my response.
“Check about the positive attitude,” I said.
“You feel that, Paul?” My dad held his hands at his sides, palms up, as if waiting for raindrops.
“No, what?”
“Triumph. It’s in the air today. By the way, what do you have in there?” He pointed to my backpack.
I considered making something up, but why not tell the truth? “Rubber duckies.”
My dad gave me a quizzical look but quickly changed his expression and flashed a thumbs-up.
There were rows of booths set up all over the blacktop, and as we walked past them on our way to our designated booth, my parents sized up the competition. A lot of people in Bellwood entered the cook-off each year, but most of them just grilled up regular old bratwurst without trying for any kind of special flare or added ingredients. These people, my parents told me, never stood a chance. They were like the horses in a race that were fast but not fast enough to compete. Really, when it came down to it, there were only about ten or so teams that had a legitimate shot at winning the whole thing. But among them, as Chad Foster said, it was anybody’s Bonanza.
